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By Root 700 0

rows of cypresses and solitary pines, and grassy banks and red brick ruins adorned with fragments of white marble; then I turned between the two pillars and went up the drive of well-raked gravel to the open space surrounded with laurels and holmoaks and the low, red villa. This time the door was opened to me not by Rita, the maid with the sly, bespectacled face, but by a thickset, bald butler with a plump face like a sacristan, in a striped working coat; and he, after addressing me as “Signor Marchese,” informed me that the “Signora Marchesa” was at home. I was startled at this noble title, which was quite new to me, and went into my mother’s study. She was sitting at her table, absorbed in the examination of a ledger, her eyeglasses on her nose and a long cigarette holder between her teeth. After the usual ritual kiss on her thin, dry cheek I said to her: “Whatever is this title of ‘Marchese’ that your butler conferred upon me? And anyhow, where does this butler come from? What’s happened to Rita?”

My mother took off her spectacles and fixed her glassy blue eyes upon me for a moment, without speaking. Then, in her most disagreeable voice, she said: “I gave Rita the sack, because she was a bad lot.”

“Why, what did she do?”

“All the men,” said my mother, “without one exception, both inside the house and out, for miles around. A nymphomaniac.”

“My goodness me!” I said. “Who would have thought it? She looked so serious.”

My mother was silent again, as if she intended to wait until my mind had recovered the serenity required to receive the news she was going to give me. “With regard to the title,” she then said, “a specialist in heraldry came to see me some time ago and explained that we come of a noble house and that we are marquesses. It seems that the title was dropped by your father’s family a century ago, no one knows why. I am now going to have the necessary researches made and so quite soon we shall have the right to use it. It seemed to me a pity not to make use of it, seeing that it belongs to us by right.”

I said nothing: my mother’s snobbishness was well known to me and had long ceased to surprise me. After a moment she went on, in a reproachful tone: “I don’t know if you realize that this is the first time you’ve come to see your mother since your—shall we call it your disappearance?—on your birthday.”

“Yes, you’re right,” I said in an adequately contrite tone of voice. “But I’ve had a great deal to do.”

“Have you started painting again?” she asked.

“Don’t worry about that,” I replied, “I’ve been busy for other reasons.”

“I don’t worry about anything. Personally, in fact, I should prefer it if you were painting.”

“Why?”

“Then you’d be thinking less about women,” said my mother in an unexpected and exceedingly unpleasant way. Then, looking me in the face, she went on: “What do you think? That one doesn’t see?”

“See what?”

My mother did not give a direct answer. “Do you know,” she asked, “that you’re looking quite completely worn out?”

I did indeed know it. During the last two months I had been overdoing it, sexually; and, above all, I had done nothing else, I had become besotted. “That may be so,” I said, “but I feel perfectly well.”

“In my opinion you ought to have a rest, get out in the open, take some exercise, breathe some good air. Why don’t you go to the mountains for a month or two?”

“Going to the mountains needs money and I haven’t any.”

Each time I pointed out my poverty, which was voluntary and essentially fictitious, my mother was indignant, as though it were an incomprehensible and fundamentally immoral quibble on my part. It was the same this time. “Dino,” she said, “you really ought not to say that.”

“Why not? It’s the fifteenth of the month and I think I have barely forty thousand lire left of my monthly allowance.”

“But, Dino, you haven’t any money because you don’t want to have any. You’re rich, Dino, you’re very rich, and it’s no good your pretending to be a poor man. You’re rich, and whatever you do you remain rich.”

It was exactly what I was thinking myself. I replied, stressing